Warner Bros. Remaking The NeverEnding Story

Warner Bros. and a pair of top-tier production companies are in the early stages of a remake of the 1980s children’s fantasy classic The NeverEnding Story, says The Hollywood Reporter.

The Kennedy/Marshall Co. (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Leonardo DiCaprio’s company Appian Way are in discussions with Warner Bros. about reviving the 25-year-old franchise with a modern spin. The studio recently acquired rights to the property, clearing the way for a potential remake.

Born out of a German-language novel by Michael Ende, the film centers on a boy named Bastian Balthazar Bux who discovers a parallel world in a book titled “The NeverEnding Story.” As the boy, a loner, delves deeper into the book, he increasingly finds his life intertwined with the plot of the novel, in which a hero in the land of Fantasia must save the universe on behalf of an empress.

The new film–which original producer Dieter Geissler–will examine the more nuanced details of the book that were glossed over in the first film, that was directed by Wolfgang Petersen.

A sequel directed by George Miller came out in 1990; a third movie followed in the U.S. in 1996 but quickly went to video.

Those familiar with the project emphasize that it is in its early stages and that writers have not been attached.